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Time Bomb

Because American politics is both divided and ineffective, it’s easy to assume that divisiveness is the problem, and being nicer and more cooperative would make government work again. Especially on occasions like the Fourth of July, the temptation is strong to hold hands and call, earnestly, for bipartisan comity. Can’t we all just get along?

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No, we can’t—even though much of our partisan division is superficial. The more basic problem is denial. Like a dysfunctional family writ across a continent, we Americans have learned to look away from some of our hardest problems, such as inequality and climate change, and, when confronted with them, wring our hands and pretend there’s nothing we can do—even when we pretend to be making a fuss about them.

Part of the reason for the denial is that doing something meaningful about these problems would deepen our conflict. It would reveal a country divided by material interests, not just partisan rhetoric and style. It would raise the stakes of politics. This is risky, but the chance might open the door to a more hopeful politics.

Talk about embracing conflict seems divisive, which is automatically taken as a bad thing these days. But division as such is not a bad thing. Cultural vitriol stirred up by cynical posturing—that is a bad thing. Much Washington partisanship is tactical, positioning the team to take another increment of power. Much popular partisanship is a matter of culture and identity—where you get your news, what kind of tone you use when pronouncing President Obama’s name, which kinds of people you wish your children or siblings wouldn’t date.

But the actual scope of disagreement in our so-called polarized time is nothing compared with the issues that divided the country during the debates over slavery, the labor-capital clashes of the Populist and Progressive eras, the same again during the New Deal or the battles of the Civil Rights era. Conservative opponents accused Franklin D. Roosevelt of taking the country down the road to fascism, with considerably more conviction than Republicans’ insincere warnings against “socialism” today. One hundred and one senators and congressmen signed the 1956 Southern Manifesto denouncing Brown v. Board of Education and defending segregation. Those were divisions worth braving. By comparison, our civic mutual loathing is a tempest in a pisspot.

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So why am I calling for conflict—real conflict, not its facsimile? Because the United States got two big doses of reality in the last six months. One was the explosive arrival of Thomas Piketty’s finding that inequality is vast and that we are headed toward a second Gilded Age, if we aren’t there already.

The other was the new set of U.N. reports on climate change, which confirmed, yet again, that the problem is real and accelerating. Happy developments like President Obama’s new greenhouse-gas rules and California’s pioneering climate legislation amount to spitting in the wind. Half of the total greenhouse-gas emissions in human history have happened just since 1970, and, growing at 2 percent a year, annual global emissions are set to double between now and 2050.Everything hard, from drought to floods to disease, is going to get worse, and, like all natural disaster, it’s going to be hardest on those who are already poor and vulnerable.

Both pieces of news ran right into a familiar politics of denial: the explicit climate-change denial that much of the Republican Party has made its specialty and the faux-outraged cries of “class warfare” that still greet factual reports on inequality.

But this is froth compared with the real denial. The real denial is structural, not rhetorical. It’s made up of policies that conceal difficulties and conflicts. This is the denial that we have to overcome in order to come to grips with the problems.

Climate denial is structural as long as the economy’s everyday feedback system, the price system, treats fossil-fuel emissions as free. We are running a carbon deficit that there is no way to repay. Like any unsustainable debt, our carbon deficit makes the borrowers feel richer than they really are, until it falls due and they are suddenly poor again—plus interest. We are greatly inflating the level of industrial activity the Earth can afford, ecologically speaking.

What about structural denial of inequality? Here the trick is actual economic debt. As Piketty and other researchers have pointed out, much of the growth in total social wealth in recent decades has gone to the very highest earners and the very wealthy—top executives and those who hold large amounts of capital. Ordinary people have seen their incomes stagnate while returns to capital, especially elite capital, grow.